


The Wind Under the Stars

by Mesopotamian



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 11:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18260789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mesopotamian/pseuds/Mesopotamian
Summary: A retelling of the entire DA:I storyline, except Cassandra Allegra Portia Calogera Filomena Pentaghast is a lesbian. There's also some other things that happen too, I guess.





	1. Prologue

It was the day of the Conclave, and Sem was having a hard time of it.

The tea was being made, the stables were being cleaned, the sisters and dignitaries and visitors were being escorted to where they needed to go. There was, absolutely, frustratingly, nothing for her to do. Servants flitted here and there, tending to their separate affairs, only acknowledging each other when two paths crossed, so that the whole mess was perfectly, efficiently coordinated. Sem felt like a child kicked out of the kitchen for helping too much, felt like a guest in her own home.

Another elf passed her by with a tray full of hot spiced cider. He had come weeks before with an entourage from upper Ferelden, and they had chatted here and there in short bursts between their individual tasks. Enna, that was his name, Sem remembered. “Sem,” he called out as soon as he saw her, veering off his path if just for a moment. “It's the big day, huh?”

“And not a thing to do,” Sem lamented.

“You’re too damned hardworking for your own good, cousin.” Enna grabbed one of the hot mugs by the rim and deftly handed it to her. “Here, have a drink and find some place quiet, the world's not going to end if you take one day off!”

Obediently, Sem took the mug as the man slipped away through a door to whatever group of dignitaries or sisters or nobles he was accommodating. She ducked through her own doorway, searching for a corner of the temple that wasn't occupied. If she hadn't a thing to do, she'd best get out of sight. An idle elf invites trouble, that's what her mother had always said. She hated the saying, but it served well enough as a cautionary tale.

Around the corner, into the store room. To sit on a sack and drink her gift and then go see if she couldn't find a nice spot to watch before the Conclave really got underway. Sitting in on the thing, even in the very back, was not worth dreaming about, but perhaps there was a crack she could listen at or a rafter she could climb up.

She barely heard the voices through the door as she turned the handle, did not even look at what had dropped to the floor in shock.

Instinct - that blasted annoyance - told her to pick up the thing that had rolled to her feet. That was it. She'd only wanted to hand it back.

She'd only wanted to help.

 

...

 

The Fade smelled, quite often, like rosemary and over-ripe cheese. Tonight there was a bit of char mixed in as well, like someone had burnt the roast and was opening all the kitchen doors to try and hurry the smoke out. Had that bit before been a dream, too? Something crunched under Sem’s feet as she walked across the barren expanse. She knew better than to look down. she knew better than to call out for help, or to try and reach the edge of the horizon, or to make sense of how she had gotten where she was. This was the Fade, and things did not need to make sense.

Ah, snow. It was snow she was walking on; she was twenty years old and having the same nightmare she always had. Soon the massacre at Haven would begin, or perhaps it had already happened. It was the perfect staging point for a demon - slaughter and sympathy. The Hero would find her out in the snow, blood on that terrible god-killing sword. But the Hero’s eyes were honey-warm with knowing. Slaughter and sympathy. It was too complex an emotion for most demons to grasp, so they usually went with one or the other.

Slaughter. Bodies scattered the ground, red seeping into the snow and sticking there like breath sticks on a window. Her Father was dead, her friends too. The sword was pointed at her. A mage, a mage it accused. Only lifted up beside those human men because of the magic deep within her breast. Blessed by Andraste. Of course the sword was pointed at her, too.

Or perhaps tonight it would be sympathy that prevailed. _Don’t come any closer,_ she called out. She always said the same damned line, like the doll on the music box her brother hid under the floorboards. The sword lowered, spurred to sympathy by that coarse plea. She wasn’t a threat - she never had been. She hated those demons, those simple-minded mockeries of soul, for taking her anger away from her. There was only fear in this version of the night. And pity, out of her control.

But the snow wasn’t snow, it was ash, and there was no Hero coming.

A shape came out of the ash instead, eight legs and fangs and entirely too many eyes. More eyes than a spider ought to have, but what did the Fade care of accuracy? What mattered was the feeling, and this one was Fear.

 _You are lost,_ it hissed at her.

 _Only because you want me to be,_ Sem responded with a bitterness that bled the accusation dry.

Another one popped up, pieced together from the ash itself. _You are wretched._

 _As the best of us are._ But with each comeback came more, three this time, five. More and more and more bubbling up until the whole expanse was set a boil with whispers. _You are alone, you are small. You are… You are..._

That awful smell of burnt roast was getting worse and worse by the minute. _Yeah?_ Sem shouted in anger, spinning round on the crowd of spiders to make sure whatever hundred eyes were watching her caught her wrath. _What else am I!_

 _Afraid._ Came the answer all at once, and it was terribly true.

Then they attacked. Or at least, she thought that they might attack, and then a beat later they all leapt at once and scrambled towards her. Since this was a dream, it was just a dash to the left and a dodge to the right and she was running, the many-legged horde miraculously behind her. Up the staircase - had there been a staircase before? she realized she didn’t care - a light shone, and within that light a draped figure. Salvation.

It reached out to her, and she to it.

 


	2. The Most Likely Place

Ah, sweet… chains? The waking hours were usually a bit more pleasant than this. A sticky sweat perhaps, some screams here or there. All pretty manageable after a cold splash of water and a hot cup of tea. This was a different feeling entirely. Her hands were numb, and most definitely locked two feet apart in some kind of metal contraption.

Sem tried to remember where she was, but she couldn’t think past the pain throbbing through her temples.

“Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now.”

The voice was strange, but the words were all too familiar to her. A woman, a human woman, paced back and forth in the dark cell. Swords and spears glinted in the firelight all around her, the only sign of the guards waiting in the shadows.

“The conclave is destroyed, everyone who attended is dead.” What was that green crack on her hand? It was a hole that looked like it could go straight through, but there wasn’t any sign of the grimy cobbled floor showing past the other side. “Except for you.”

Her arm was jostled up to expose the glowing green of the hole in her hand. “Explain this.”

The words finally reached her. She had been caught. Sem had rehearsed this moment a thousand times, gone over every option in her head, but this had never been in the list of scenarios. “An awfully nasty paper cut,” she blurted out. Stupid.

“ _Don’t_ play games with me!”

Sem braced herself for the hit, but it never came. Another woman had grabbed the first interrogator’s arm. “Cassandra, we need her,” she said from behind a dusty blue hood.

“I don’t know what that is, or what happened at the Conclave...” Sem backtracked. Had they said everyone was _dead?_

“Do you remember anything?” the hooded woman asked.

“Enna…” she all but whispered the name, the memory already making tears well up in her eyes. Whoever these women were, they did not care about the pleasant small-talk between two elves or the stolen mug of cider. What had come after that?

“I was running…” she started louder, trying to make it seem like maybe she hadn’t been in the Fade with a bajillion demons chasing after her. Those who were not magically inclined didn’t often understand the mundanities that a mage went through on a nightly basis. “Up to the top of a ledge, where a woman took my hand. I think she saved me,” she finally finished. Plausible. Very much could be true. Sem herself had no reason to believe that this wasn’t, in fact, what had happened.

“What _did_ happen out there?” she asked. She was not too interested in the answer - these things had a tendency of revealing themselves in time - but she thought ignorance to be a good look right now.

But perhaps she had misjudged the situation. There was a long silence, shared between the two women while Sem sat dumbly watching. One left the room. The one who had nearly hit her - Cassandra - stayed behind. She really wished it had been the other way around.

“It’s better if you see,” Cassandra said. To her credit, she unlocked the uncomfortable metal thing and wrapped Sem’s hands tightly in a more portable length of rope. As a show of good faith, Sem sat as still as she could, and let the woman lift her up.

The light from outside sent fresh waves of nastiness coursing through her head, her neck, her hand, which all seemed to be intrinsically connected in their shared throbbing. She squinted against it, but barely had time to adjust before the big crack in the sky made its presence known. Sem couldn’t help staring at that, headache and all. There was no doubt that the hole in the sky matched the hole in her hand, and she understood suddenly and fully why she was still being allowed to live. And why she was likely going to die, very soon.

At least the air was nice and cold out here.

Cassandra was explaining it all to her. She called it the Breach. Good. A catchy named helped things go down the line better; she was glad they weren’t asking her to come up with one. Just an explanation for everything, a much easier task.

“Now, I’m not an expert on explosions,” Sem said when she had finished. That tongue of hers again, wagging. Her mother had probably had an expression for that too, but she couldn’t pull one up just then. “But they don’t usually call demons forth from the sky, do they?”

“This one does.” The woman turned to look at her. She stood a good two or three inches taller than Sem, but that wasn’t really saying much. Most people were a good two or three inches taller than her, and this fact wasn’t even the most intimidating thing about Cassandra here. No, maybe that was the sword, or the scars lining her face. Hot. But dangerous. “And it's growing. Unless we act, it may swallow the world.”

A gurgled shout was probably not the response that Cassandra was looking for, but it was the one that Sem gave her. The pain - which was neither in her neck nor her head nor her hand but rather two feet to the left and behind her but still definitely connected to her whole being - etched itself across her mind and left her on the ground, kneeling. “Looks like its gonna swallow me, too,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Each time the Breach expands, so does that mark on your hand... and it _is_ killing you.”

“Alright... you’ve got my attention.”

Cassandra had the courtesy to help her up, though it was in the _you are still a prisoner_ sort of way. They walked. Sem tried not to fall over, a task made more difficult by the woman leading her forward by the scruff of her next like some misbehaving puppy. Men and women looked out at them from hastily erected tents, and Sem knew what kind of thoughts rattled around in their heads. She had seen the eyes of a mob before, the accusation that only a lot of idiots together could muster up. Cassandra echoed her dark thoughts. They blamed her. Of course they did. She was starting to blame herself, truth be told.

A knife came out. Ropes were cut. Maybe this Cassandra thought she was doing her a favor, maybe she was one of the crowd and would’ve liked to see her run, guilty. “I can promise you a trial. No more.”

 

...

 

“Is there some place we’re going?” Sem asked. Usually prisoners stayed in prison.

“Your mark must be tested on something smaller than the Breach.” They passed through a gate, onto a path that Sem had tread more than a thousand times. Still, she tripped. Or perhaps it was another surge from the Breach into her hand: it was getting harder and harder to tell what was pain and what wasn’t.

The woman helped her up again, more gently this time. “The larger the Breach grows, the more rifts appear, the more demons we face.”

“The whole ‘this thing is killing me’ was motivation enough, thank you,” Sem said. The scowl on the woman’s face would have been funny, under different circumstances.

“Don’t you want to know what happened? How we found you?”

“No,” she said flatly. The crunch of the woman’s boots ahead of her was the only response, after that. They walked the path, bodies half buried in the snow, some of the rubble around them still on fire. The silence unnerved her, and she thought she might have offended the woman. Too much, too quickly. She always let her mood sour her luck.

But luck had not abandoned her completely, and as the bridge they were crossing over exploded in a hail of green fire, things got quite loud again. Demons! Sem knew how to deal with those, at least.

“Get behind me!” Cassandra called out to her, drawing her sword. How had she gotten up so fast? Sem was still on the ground, trying to figure out which part of herself hurt the most now. A warrior’s training was really nothing to scoff at.

Inky black goo rose up from the ground in front of her and Sem did not panic. She grabbed the nearest thing to her, which happened to be a stick, and brandished it at the forming figure. The thing brandished its teeth right back. The thing didn’t have any teeth, just more goo. It lunged, and she couldn’t rely on the thick slowness of dreams to save herself.

The stick was, actually, quite useless. It kept the gooey monster from completely encompassing her, but it's dripping maw still mashed at her face and its claws still raked across her skin. “Get!” Sem shouted at it, feeling the weight build up in her chest, that comforting fire. “BACK!” And then the fire was outside of her, swirling around and burning the demon up to an unintelligible crisp.

Sem huffed, out of breath from the exertion of even that one spell, if one could call it a spell and not simply an instinct. Still, she heaved herself up on her own this time, using the staff as support. Her proud moment was cut short, however, by a sword pointing directly at her.

“Drop your weapon, now!” Cassandra commanded, and they were back at square one all over again.

“This is a weapon?” Sem pushed the overgrown stick out in front of her, examining it. The end was wrapped in blue cloth, and looked like it might give someone a good knock, but other than that the staff was no match against all that armor the woman was wearing.

“Yes, that’s a…” The woman seemed taken aback. Or perhaps annoyed. It was hard to tell, with a scowl like that. “I saw you cast magic with that staff. Now put it down.”

“Alright, alright.” Sem dropped the staff with little fuss, the soft snow lining the ground muffling the sound of its clatter against the broken cobblestone. She held her hands up, in a fake plea. “Would you like to tie my hands again, too? With some more of that nice, flammable rope?”

“Are you mocking me?” That terrible sword had not been lowered yet. Sem knew, in all her arrogance, that she was letting the anger push her a little too close to the edge of an early grave.

Her hands turned from sardonic shrug to genuine passivity, palms held up, one of them glowing a damning green. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but just now? That was the extent of my power. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it all the way up there to close your Breach without that little walking stick.”

Cassandra looked as if she were about to argue, but then her expression changed, softened. “You’re right. There will be more demons, and I cannot expect you to remain defenseless against them.” Cassandra sheathed her sword, finally, and led the way back onto the path. “Take the staff, but stay close to me.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Sem said, huffing up the rubble to try and catch up, pulling her weight up with her newfound crutch. “I'd much rather there be no demons at all, than have a pretty new staff.”

“I will feel better when the Breach is closed.” Now, that was progress. Cassandra did not seem the type to entertain a prisoner's snark, so perhaps Sem was growing out of the role. She stopped and turned to Sem, once they were back on the path proper. “I should remember that you did not attempt to run.”

Progress, indeed.

 

…

 

“What’s that up ahead?” Sem asked, squinting at the pulsing gap in the sky at the bottom of the slope they’d climbed up. She supposed she already knew the answer - the eerie green glow of it becoming all too familiar - but conversation felt a lot more natural than simply letting the rift go unmentioned. She squinted at the shapes below the rift, dark blurs fighting against even darker ones. “And who’s down there?”

“There will be time for introductions later,” Cassandra said, drawing her sword for probably the fifteenth time since Sem had woken up from her terrible nap. “Hurry now, we must help them!”

 

How many demons must she fight today? Even the Fade was better than this. She could, at least, look forward to waking up when it was that gut-twisting dreamland. Now, there was only more demons spewing out of the rift. _Here’s another one,_ Sem thought, as it lunged towards her. She put her hand out, screaming, and… it screamed back? They all did, recoiling from the loud thud that pulsed out from her hand like a chair leg banging against a wood floor. Except the chair leg was impossibly heavy, and the floor was the bottom of her ear drums.

Sem didn’t like it. The demons liked it even less, and in that split second that the demons were paralysed, twisting in and around themselves, the soldiers fighting next to her gained the upper hand. The one in front of her was slashed in half, its ugly purple-black splatter obscuring whoever it was who had done the slashing.

“Quickly! Before more come through!” Someone right next to her called out, though he sounded so far away. She felt herself being dragged forward, hand first, towards the rift. Then that awful sound again, like bones cracking now, like her arm shattering into a thousand pieces and reassembling itself before she even remembered how to be in pain.

She did not ask for an explanation, did not need to make sense of the fragmented green light squeezing itself back into wherever the fuck it had come from. This was the Fade, that she had just touched in the waking realm, and nothing about that made sense.

The crack in the world was closed. Behind her, Sem could hear the scraping of weapons and the scuffing of boots as the soldiers began to relax. Now that there was nothing green and oozing directly in front of them, they thought that was progress. Such simple creatures.

“Whatever magic opened the Breach in the sky also placed that mark upon your hand,” the elf who had grabbed her hand said, answering the question she had not asked. She looked at him, thoroughly and for a long time, but could not place him. Bald, long ears, quite elfy in the nose and the eyes, but still completely foreign to her. “I theorized that the mark might be able to close the rifts that have opened in the Breach’s wake -- and it seems I was correct.”

“Meaning it might be able to close the Breach itself,” Cassandra chimed in, having finished cleaning the demon slime off her sword.

“Sure,” Sem said, looking down at her hand. “Why the Fade not.”

 _But it might kill me_. She didn’t want to die, was going along with all of this expressly not to die. So Sem kept the rest of the thought to herself; she wasn’t about to throw away all that trust-building she’d done with Cassandra by planting a little seed of doubt in everyone’s plan. That was her seed. She’d water it and grow it herself, and if it came to resemble the truth, she’d take her little doubt-tree and fuck right off.

“Possibly,” the elf responded, waving a hand in Sem’s general direction. “It seems you hold the key to our salvation.”

“Good to know! Here I thought we’d be ass deep in demons forever.” Ah, that’s right, there had been a dwarf fighting alongside them. Sem turned to greet him, and he introduced himself before she could even ask. “Varric Tethras: Rogue, storyteller, and occasionally unwelcome tagalong.”

“Semira Tanelle,” Sem responded in turn. She placed one index finger onto the other and moved down the line as she listed off her own attributes. “Mage, housekeeper, and the salvation of Thedas now, apparently.”

That got a chuckle out of the dwarf. He had a face that befitted laughing: a wide mouth, crow’s feet that crinkled around warm brown eyes, and no beard or sideburns to obscure any of it. She liked this Varric already; the first people to introduce themselves in a crowd were usually the best conversationalists.

“My name is Solas, if there are to be introductions.” The unplaceable elf stepped forward, and even with a name he felt like an old painting on the wall -- the subject dead and the symbolism long forgotten. “I am pleased to see you still alive.”

“Solas. Pleased to meet you,” Sem said brusquely, rubbing her hands together in front of her, an unspoken contrast to the hands clasped behind the other elf’s back. “Now, I understand the urgency of the situation and so I will not let this taint my impression of you but in the future, you do not touch me.” She thought, maybe, if she was allowed to shove her hand into the Fade on her own accord, it wouldn’t blow her ears out quite so badly. This was not said, and instead Sem only wagged her finger at him in a vague threat.

“Solas here was the one who kept that mark from killing you while you slept,” Varric said helpfully, and he really did have the sort of tone that smoothed over little bumps and pieced hostilities back together.

“My apologies,” he said, giving a short bow of his bald head. “I acted brashly.”

How polite. _You can stay then,_ Sem thought, though she knew that she had almost no control over the situation, and likely wouldn’t so long as she was acting as everyone’s living key to closing the rifts. Rope or not, staff or not, she was still a prisoner. Lest the pleasant cooperation that had settled between the four of them make her forget.

“Let’s move out,” Cassandra said. “The forward camp is down this bank.”

 

…

 

They walked, they fought demons, they walked some more. Sem didn’t get any better with the staff that she’d found, though she refused to let go of it, just in case it decided to produce a fireball again.

There had been a long stretch without any demons, and it seemed like her travelling companions were allowing themselves to relax a bit. Except for Cassandra, who led the line, occasionally calling down orders to avoid this way or mind that gap in the cobbled path.

“So… are you innocent?” Varric asked, plodding a short ways ahead.

“I can’t muster up any good reason why I would wish to evaporate my childhood home,” Sem responded. “But I’ve surprised myself before.”

“You don’t remember, huh?”

“Not a thing.” Her foot slipped on the rock she was attempting to climb, and Sem lost several feet of progress in her upward climb. Varric reached a hand out to her, and she let the sturdy dwarf haul her up. “One moment I was enjoying a hot cup of cider, and the next --”

“Demons?”

“Everywhere.”

“That’ll damn you every time. Should’ve spun a story.”

“That’s what you would have done,” Cassandra commented from the front of the line, pulling a pine branch back out of the way of the path.

“Just advising the kid against a premature execution,” Varric cracked back, taking the branch from Cassandra’s grasp and holding it so it didn’t hit the next person in line.

 

…

 

The forward camp was actually just a bridge with crates and tables set up to form a barrier against the demons. Sem suspected this defense was mostly for emotional comfort. Injured men and women were laid out in a line, protected from wind and ash by the hard stone, propped up with folded coats where they could be spared. Soldiers. All of them were soldiers in uniform, not a single member of the Conclave present, servant or noble.

None save Sem, who walked in silence behind Cassandra, wherever she led them. “Leliana, what a relief,” the warrior woman called out to a figure ahead of them. They all stopped in front of a table, the kind with papers and maps strewn about that one might expect to find inside a general’s tent. Except there were no tents in the camp, not a scrap of linen wasted on such comforts.

“You made it,” Leliana said, and Sem recognized her as the hooded woman in the cell. “Chancellor Roderick, this is--”

“I know who she is,” that awful nasally voice cut in. Roderick glared at Sem, and Sem glared back at him. If this was who was going to be putting her on trial, she had little hope, even with Varric’s coaching.

“As Grand Chancellor of the Chantry, I hereby order you to take this criminal to Val Royeaux to face execution.”

“Order me?” The look on Cassandra’s face was pure rage, the sort that brightened Sem’s heart and made her hopeful for a better future. “You are a glorified clerk, a bureaucrat!”

“And you are a servant!” Roderick did not give Cassandra room to fight back, occupying the whole space with his spotty face and nostril-induced voice. “When I allowed this elf to remain under the protection of Haven’s Chantry she vowed to cut ties with those heretics that once occupied Andraste’s most holy place. But now I see that trust was misplaced, and we have all paid dearly for my mistake…”

Roderick’s voice got to such a miserable level of nasalliness that Sem almost sympathised with him. But then he pointed an accusing finger at her, and the pitiable gravel in his voice made her want to spit. “This woman is a cultist, a saboteur from the beginning who has done nothing but take advantage of us! And you let her walk freely.”

Nevermind. He could get swallowed up by one of these demon-spewing rifts and rot in the Fade. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Sem said, the anger seeped down to the bottom of her like silt settling in a glass.

“Is what he says true?” the warrior woman asked.

“Cassandra,” Sem almost breathed the name, filling it with as much familiarity as she dared. “You said you would remember that I didn’t run. I’m not running, and I won’t spin any tales. But right now we don’t have time to figure out the truth.”

The threat of death passed. She could see it in Cassandra’s eyes, the belief there, the earnesty she had never expected from a stranger. Whatever the conversation had been bubbling up to simmered back down, and it looked like Sem would be allowed to live for a couple of hours yet. She didn’t hear what else they were talking about. That awful strung-out noise from the rift had come back and left her dim, the world pulsing green, patterns laid over top each other like layers of cloth that didn’t quite match up at the edges. Someone had sewn the hem of the world up wrong, and now everything was coming undone at the seams.

“The mountains are too risky,” Cassandra’s voice torn past the illusion and the world came back into focus. “We lost contact with an entire squad on that path.”

“I can get us through the mountains,” Sem chimed in before she knew she was speaking, before she even remembered what the conversation had shifted to. Get to the temple. That’s right. Stop the Breach. Save Thedas, live another day. Easy. “I’ve been through the ruins before.”

“Why are we still letting that heathen have a say--”

“Do you know what’s at stake here?” Sem cut Roderick off, and the anger was elating. “It’s not your damned politics, it’s not my life. It’s everything!” She took a step forward, only barely keeping herself from jumping the table to strangle the hairy old man. “We take the mountain path. After the Breach is closed, _then_ we can discuss whether you want to execute me in Orlais or Ferelden. But for now, we work together.”

That was it. They were moving again, and Sem’s head felt clearer for letting out the steam.

“Leliana, gather everyone left in the valley. Everyone,” Cassandra commanded.

Chancellor Roderick was stooped over like a plant with root-rot, staring deadly at the map on the table as if it could reveal any answers to him. He’d lost, but he still had enough venom in him for one more sting. “On your head be the consequences, Seeker.”

 _On my ears_ , Sem corrected him silently. _It’s always been on my ears_. She cut off the path quite early, and led them through the packed snow to the base of the cliffs.

 

…

 

The Temple of Sacred Ashes was ash itself, now.

Three successfully sealed rifts and a rescued band of scouts later, and the four of them were now haphazardly picking their way through the rubble of the temple’s outer wall. The ground crackled under their feet, and Sem was trying hard not to look down too often. Too many parts to recognize, there in the rubble. Sometimes her feet wouldn’t crunch, but _squish_ , against something slimy and cooked, and she had to make an especial effort to force her eyes up, up to the hazy green of the sky. She could fill her mind up with that green, which didn’t make any sense, and which she didn’t need to think about, because it was _there_ and _real_ and so far beyond anything she could imagine.

The crunch underfoot though, there were all kinds of things _that_ could be.

“Do you see that, Seeker?” Varric’s voice interrupted their silent march, briefly drowning out the low crackle of still-burning fire.

“Red lyrium,” Cassandra replied, somber. Sem didn’t know what red lyrium was, but she wished they would stop talking about it. If any more attention was brought to the ground, she would have to look, and that would pull her out of her thoughtless reverie.

“What’s it _doing here_?” Varric kept going. Damn. Before she could stop herself, Sem’s eyes flitted down to the path ahead of them, where Cassandra was leading them through the chunks of once-pillared halls.

She barely saw the jagged red crystals, with their weird pulsing like blood in veins. Instead, she saw the body that the crystals had grown out of, muscles on its face unburnt just enough to preserve the horror masked there, the lipless screaming mouth, the eyes that steamed. Its torso was fragmented into pieces, crystalized organs spilling upwards, growing like carnations out of cracked ribs.

The sight of it brought the rest of her senses to her, flooding her mind all at once. Wet ash drifted through the air. It clung to her boots, choked her nostrils with a thick and sweet smell. She could hear his voice, still. It was whispering. It was screaming. Deep, ragged breaths pulled the air right out of her lungs, her feet sinking into the ash until she couldn’t move.

 

...

 

When Sem came to, she was on her knees, a pair of gauntleted hands holding her up so she didn’t fall any further. Voices were talking over her, about her.

“Will she be able to close the Breach, in this state?”

“It doesn’t matter. We go now - there won’t be another chance.”

There was Cassandra, supporting her weight, and the hooded woman standing by with a dozen archers. Sem swallowed, her throat hot and dry from the ash.

“I can do it,” she said, heaving herself up with gritted teeth. Cassandra’s hands wavered to help her, but then pulled away. Sem was not looking at her, or any of them. Her eyes were focused high on the breach, a fragmented pile of glass, a broken window that saw right into the Fade. “Just get me up there.”

“No,” the other elf said. He stood facing away from the rest of them, his hands folded neatly behind his back again. “That won’t be necessary. The rift at the center of the temple seems to be the source. If we close it, the Breach should mend itself.”

“I don’t know fuck all about that,” Sem said, exhaustion draining the very last drops of politeness out of her.

“Yes,” Solas agreed. “I know you don’t.” The glance that he gave her then, sideways and solemn, made Sem want to punch him square in his glossy nose. But she didn’t, because she was still a bit dizzy, and because as smug as he was, she had the feeling he really was trying to speak up for her.

“The magic involved here is unlike any I have ever seen,” Solas continued. He turned completely around to face Cassandra and the other woman, placid as ever. “For what it is worth, I do not think any single mage, let alone your prisoner here, could have done this.”

“We don’t have time to discuss all the theories. Now we must act, before this Breach gets any bigger.” Cassandra said. She was still hovering over Sem, waiting for her to crash down into the ash again. “Semira, can you walk?” She asked, and the urgency spoiled her caring tone a bit.

“It’s just Sem, thanks. If you’re going to be the one speaking at my funeral…” Sem let the morbid joke run dry, and merely nodded her assent. “Yes. I can walk.”

 

And walk she did, each step down the crumbling mounds of ash and rubble taking her closer to that waking nightmare. The voice she had heard before was getting louder now, reverberating as if he was shouting down a very long, and very narrow hallway. It made things bubble up inside her. Images. Stuff that should stay unremembered. Sem pulled out the green fuzzy sound of the rift ahead of them, tried to drown herself in it so that those voices wouldn’t reach her below the surface.

_Let go of the Divine!_

Well, that sounded familiar. That was her voice, but Sem wasn’t using it just now. She was busy huffing and puffing as she scraped down the last ledge on her hands and belly. And that’s not what she had said, not all of it anyway. Sliding her feet fully to the ground, Sem stopped her decent and raised her hand, the green there throbbing like pain, not dulled by the smear of soot covering her palms at all. Her fingers remembered the grasp of something, in that hand. _Let go of her, or I’ll smash this thing._ That’s what she had said.

Sem couldn’t see the thing she’d been holding, now. Only the image of the Divine tied up, and someone speaking just out of her field of vision, inconveniently shadowy. Like in a dream, her mind supplied the nearest image, the silhouette of Haven’s old Father, his blood-stained hands pointing accusingly at her.

_We have an intruder. Slay the elf._

But that couldn’t be right. Her Father was dead, and he always washed his hands after a ritual.

“Is anyone else hearing this?” Varric asked, glancing at the air as if he could see the phantoms haunting Sem, too.

Oh. He could. They all could.

“Echoes of what happened here. The Fade bleeds into this place.” Solas was still walking forward, through the voices and the visions. He stopped in front of the rift, surveying it like one surveys art in an Orlesian smoking room.

“Is this vision true?” Cassandra asked, getting much to close to Sem. “Who attacked? And the Divine, did you really--”

A muscle right under Sem’s jaw twitched, as she made herself as tall as she could without resorting to tiptoes. “I don’t. _Remember_.”

There was nothing but fire in Cassandra’s dark eyes, but Sem held her gaze still, until they cooled. A shift, a hand come off the hilt of her sword, and Semira was left alive. “Very well,” Cassandra relented. “There will be a time for answers, later. Do what you must.”

Shouldering past the bigger woman - but only a little bit bigger, Sem realized, a lifetime in the Frostbacks had not left her so helpless - she went to stand next to her fellow elf. She crossed her arms in front of her and put a finger on her lower lip, mimicking the same artful indifference that Solas had put on.

“With the mark, this rift can be opened, and then sealed properly and safely.” Solas did not move to grab her arm, this time. He was waiting for her to understand, she realized. “However, opening the rift will attract attention from the other side.”

“You don’t have to tell me about demons,” Sem interrupted him. This mentorly attitude was a step up from being dragged around unwittingly, but she was still a bit too old for lectures. She waggled her fingers at him, forgetting for a moment the green glow that diffused them. “Got magic too, remember?”

Before he could respond, Sem turned her back to the rift and addressed the others. “Get ready,” she commanded in a voice that seemed too loud for her uneasy frame. “Something big is on its way!”

There was a general shuffling of armor and arrows as Cassandra and Leliana echoed the orders to others behind them.

One foot pressed back into the ashen earth, as Sem readied herself for the blow. She lifted her hand up to the rift, and… Well, that’s all she could think of to do, really. It was enough. A finger of light spiraled down from the rift and set her hand on fire. As the rift was pried open, Sem had the distinct feeling that she was merely an object in between two forces.

On the mountain above the Temple of Sacred Ashes, a glacier was slowly, slowly making its way down to the valley below. In the winter, it slept under a blanket of snow, but come spring the ice stirred awake. With a terrible cracking of tendons and joints the glacier began its giant’s journey once again. Sem had been up there a few times to the edge of it. The sound was like nothing she had ever heard, an ancient grinding of teeth, the sheer power and mass of the glacier overcoming everything around it with that terrible sound. It chewed at the landscape, slowly, slowly, but ever so surely.

That is what the rift opening felt like, she thought absently as a wash of green ichor drained out of the Fade.

Except the glacier was inside of her also, and when the rift opened up, so did she.


End file.
